Startups

Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica: Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based startup, has petitioned the USPTO to acquire the “abandoned” Twitter trademark and launch its own social network  —  A Virginia startup calling itself “Operation Bluebird” announced this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent …

The team behind the Celo-based app is joining Stripe, while the intellectual property is returned to cLabs.

Karri Saarinen has prioritized work-life balance while building Linear, a $1.25 billion company.

A simple framework helps VC investors assess and identify durable long-term value when investing capital in AI. The post AI in Venture Capital: Separating Signal from Noise appeared first on CFA Institute Enterprising Investor.

CAR-T cancer therapies now need to succeed in randomized, controlled trials to earn approvals. Elsewhere, a drug from Bristol Myers Squibb and BioNTech proved effective in breast cancer patients.

As investors turn to capital efficiency and sustainable scaling, there are lessons to be learned from the Southeast — where founders have long built successful companies by doing more with less.

Heather Somerville / Wall Street Journal: How US startups like Oakland-based Brimstone are racing to develop sources of raw materials that the US needs for tech, an industry China has long dominated  —  Startups and venture capital are joining the nationwide push to develop new sources of metals the U.S. desperately needs

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Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change—for a price. The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects  nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they’ve reached the necessary altitude, those planes will disperse particles engineered to reflect away enough…

Getting inferencing infrastructure into orbit may soon be cheaper than building it down here Space startup Aetherflux says it plans to put its first data center satellite into orbit during the first quarter of 2027.…

Danielle Popov / South China Morning Post: DEEP Robotics, a Hangzhou-based startup that builds quadruped and humanoid robots, raised a $70M Series C to expand R&D and production capacity  —  Company founder Zhu Qiuguo says the new funding would be used for research and the recruitment of top robotics talent

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Chinese AI startup Z.ai releases the GLM-4.6V series of vision models, with support for native function calling, available with 106B and 9B parameters  —  The release includes two models in “large” and “small” sizes:  — GLM-4.6V (106B), a larger 106-billion parameter model aimed at cloud-scale inference

The two chip companies have signed a term sheet according to sources with direct knowledge of the agreement.

To grow your startup safely, always put profit and customer needs first instead of chasing venture capital hype.

Space-based solar power startup Aetherflux has thrown its hat into the emerging market for orbital data centers, joining SpaceX, Amazon and others exploring ways to move energy-hungry artificial intelligence compute off Earth. The post Space-based solar power startup Aetherflux enters orbital data center race appeared first on SpaceNews.

Aetherflux has focused its efforts on space-based solar power, with the goal of "building an American power grid in space."

A Virginia-based startup, Operation Bluebird, has filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to nullify the trademarks of Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk's X Corp. read more

The journey from startup visionary to sustainable business requires a fundamental shift in leadership The post Insights: To be or not to be CEO of your own startup appeared first on Gulf Business.

Modern Hydrogen has letting go most of its roughly 80 staffers and telling vendors to hit pause on every project.…

Daniele Lepido / Bloomberg: Italy-based humanoid robotics startup Generative Bionics raised €70M led by CDP Venture Capital, with participation from Tether, AMD Ventures, and others  —  Stablecoin giant Tether has joined a €70 million ($81.6 million) funding round for Italy-based Generative Bionics …

The deal, which includes another $200 million in potential payouts, hands the California biotech a candidate in late-stage testing for the most severe form of viral hepatitis. 

Laith Al-Khalaf / Financial Times: Singapore-based banking and payments startup Airwallex raised $330M at an $8B valuation, after raising $300M at a $6.2B valuation in May, and plans a US HQ  —  Payments company opens San Francisco base and reduces Tencent's holding in US pivot  —  A Singapore fintech that was labelled a …

Steven Rosenbush / Wall Street Journal: How Pathway, a startup developing an alternative to the transformer, aims to use its Dragon Hatchling architecture to create a new class of adaptive AI systems  —  The architecture underlying large language models revolutionized AI.  Pathway's Dragon Hatchling is designed to do more.

Crypto venture funding was weak in November, with only a few major raises driving totals, as overall deal activity reached one of its lowest points this year.

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: Seattle-based Yoodli, which sells AI-powered communication training software, raised a $40M Series B led by WestBridge Capital, valuing the startup at $300M+  —  Yoodli, an AI-powered communication training startup, has reached a valuation of more than $300 million — more than triple …

A California-based nuclear energy company with plans to place small modular reactors (SMRs) in mile-deep boreholes said it will break ground December 9 for a pilot project at a site in Parsons, Kansas. Berkeley-headquartered Deep Fission on December 4 said the company’s Gravity Nuclear Reactor is bring prepared for the Great Plains Industrial Park. Deep […] The post Nuclear Startup Announces Kansas Site for Mile-Deep Reactor Pilot appeared first on POWER Magazine.

AI startups say the promise of turning dazzling models into useful products is harder than anyone expected. Three founders discuss what it takes.

Scrum Ventures pumps ‘seven figures’ into Circulate Health to advance healthspan-focused plasma exchange services.   Therapeutic plasma exchange provider Circulate … Continue reading "Therapeutic plasma exchange startup lands strategic investment" The post Therapeutic plasma exchange startup lands strategic investment appeared first on Longevity.Technology - Latest News, Opinions, Analysis and Research.

New York Times: The NYT sues Perplexity, claiming the AI startup violated its copyrights and failed to stop using its content despite repeated demands over the past 18 months  —  Filed in federal court on Friday, the suit joins more than 40 other court disputes between copyright holders and A.I. companies.

An AI image generator startup’s database was left accessible to the open internet, revealing more than 1 million images and videos, including photos of real people who had been “nudified.”

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AI use among CPG executives has jumped 69% from last year, human creativity and pristine datasets still matter for food innovation. The post Why CPG execs, not startups, now lead the AI adoption surge in food production appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Buying a ready-made business isn't "cheating;" it's the smarter, faster and more sustainable way to win.

Steven Levy / Wired: A profile of AI hearing aid startup Fortell, which has raised $150M so far and is targeting affluent clients in NYC with a $6,800 device that uses a custom chip  —  AI-powered startup Fortell has become a secret handshake for the privileged hearing-impaired crowd who swear by the product.

Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times: AI legal software startup Harvey raised $160M led by a16z at an $8B valuation, up from $3B after raising $300M in February, taking its funding in 2025 to $760M  —  The start-up is now valued at about $8 billion as it pushes to add new customers, including those outside law firms.

Zanskar uses AI to identify hidden geothermal systems—and claims it has found one that could fuel a power plant, the first such discovery by industry in decades.

Benoit Berthelot / Bloomberg: Yann LeCun says his unnamed AI startup will not receive financial backing from Meta, will focus on advanced AI world models, and hints it will be Paris-based  —  Yann LeCun, the artificial intelligence pioneer who is leaving Meta Platforms Inc. at the end of the year, said Meta will not financially …

Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal: University of Virginia professor Ken Ono, one of the world's most prominent mathematicians, joins AI startup Axiom Math, which is building an “AI mathematician”  —  Ken Ono had an epiphany.  Now the professor is moving to Silicon Valley to chase mathematical superintelligence.

SciNeuro announced Thursday that it raised $53 million to study a former GSK compound in an eye complication of diabetes as well as dementia. The neuroscience biotech’s second venture funding round comes five years after ...

When Ken Frazier led Merck, one of the challenges of developing Keytruda was getting the blockbuster-to-be immunotherapy to a broad set of patients. Many patients who could have benefited from the drug couldn't access it ...

Home care startup Inbound Health shut down Monday after a deal to raise more money fell apart, Endpoints News has learned. It's the latest in a string of health tech closures, as investors who once ...

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Here's how Blake Lawrence built Opendorse, streamlining NIL deals for 100,000+ college athletes.

Triana Biomedicines has reeled in a $120 million Series B — $10 million higher than its 2022 Series A — to collect proof-of-concept data for its lead experimental medicine and ...

And more biotech news updates, brought to you by The Readout

Cade Metz / New York Times: A look at startups like AGI and Plato, which build replicas of websites to let AI agents learn to navigate and complete specific tasks, like booking flights  —  This summer, lawyers at United Airlines noticed that someone had built an almost perfect replica of the company's website.

Retro Bio, a longevity startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is close to raising what could be one of the drug industry’s largest investment rounds.

Financial Times: Software testing startup Antithesis raised $105M led by trading firm Jane Street, as demand grows for software to vet code generated by AI coding tools  —  Trading firm Jane Street leads $105mn investment in software testing group Antithesis  —  Companies' rapid embrace of artificial intelligence tools …

Valida Pau / The Information: ServiceNow announces a deal to acquire identity security startup Veza, sources say for between $1B and $1.5B; Veza had a private valuation of $808M in March  —  Dealmakers apparently did not get much of a break over the Thanksgiving weekend, as a flurry of recent merger announcements showed.

Globes: Israeli startup Zafran, an AI-native threat exposure management service, raised a $60M Series C led by Menlo Ventures, bringing its total funding to $130M  —  Zafran has also launched its agentic exposure management suite, positioning it to complete the entire end-to-end lifecycle across asset inventory …

Sri Muppidi / The Information: Sources: Anthropic is in talks to buy developer tool startup Bun for low hundreds of millions, its first acquisition; Claude Code hit $1B in annualized revenue  —  Anthropic is in advanced discussions to buy Bun, a maker of software used to run and manage code more efficiently, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.

Krystal Hu / Reuters: US and Israeli cloud data management startup Eon raised $300M led by Gil at a $4B valuation, up from $1.4B in November 2024, taking its total funding to $500M  —  Cloud data-management startup Eon said it has raised $300 million in a new funding round led by Gil Capital and that its valuation has almost tripled to $4 billion.

Some of the biggest names in oncology R&D have been quietly consolidating assets, money and programs under a new startup called Medici Therapeutics, Endpoints News has learned. The stealthy startup's backers include two of the ...

Bloomberg: Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium, spun out of the nonprofit AI lab Kyutai, raised $70M led by FirstMark and Eurazeo, after launching in September  —  A Paris-based artificial intelligence voice startup called Gradium has spun out of a nonprofit research lab and raised $70 million in funding …

The Trump administration is making its first major CHIPS R&D move with a potential $150 million investment in Pat Gelsinger's xLight, aiming to develop a next-generation EUV laser and accelerate America's broader push to reclaim leadership in advanced semiconductor manufacturing. read more

The Information: Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal that could top $5B; Celestial was valued at $2.5B in March 2025  —  Marvell is in advanced talks to buy Santa Clara-based chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal worth multiple billions of dollars …

XLight, a 2021 US chip startup, is receiving a £120m boost from the Donald Trump government. Here is what the technology company does and why the funding matters.

The big biotech, which has made genetic medicine a focus in recent years, is paying Tessera $150 million for rights to a potential one-and-done treatment for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch: An analysis of Crunchbase and PitchBook data: in 2025 so far, 80+ tech startups reached $1B valuations, many of them focused on AI with exceptions like Kalshi  —  With AI igniting an investor frenzy, every month, more startups obtain unicorn status.  —  Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook …

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is expanding its investment in gene editing through a new partnership with Tessera Therapeutics, a well-funded startup that is preparing to test its first experimental therapy in a clinical trial ...

Financial Times: German AI startup Black Forest Labs, which develops the open-source Flux image models, raised $300M at a $3.25B valuation, up from $1B in September 2024  —  Low-profile group has quickly emerged as a top developer of image generation technology  —  German start-up Black Forest Labs …

Corinne Reichert / CNET: How Animaj, a startup in Disney's Accelerator Program, uses AI to drastically speed up the animation process, while also claiming to let artists stay in control  —  Disney checked out “thousands of AI companies” before backing one that keeps animators in the driver's seat.

NBC News: US startups are increasingly adopting Chinese open source AI models, as some capabilities of Chinese models start to catch up with those of frontier US labs  —  AI startups are seeing record valuations, but many are building on a foundation of cheap, free-to-download Chinese AI models.

Tech-oriented investment firm FuturePlay said Monday it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Investment to support Korean startups’ entry into the regional market and encourage joint investments into promising firms. This is the first MOU between a Korean venture capital and the ministry, creating the potential for it to serve as a stepping stone for further cooperation between the two countries in the startup and venture capital ecosystem. Under the agreement, the two sides will cooperate to support firms invested in by FuturePlay and other Korean startups entering Saudi Arabia; make joint investments in health care, fintech, logistics, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing; and for joint development of Saudi Stars and jointly develop Saudi Stars, a program designed to nurture promising entrepreneurs in the kingdom. The ministry was established in 2020 to drive the kingdom’s Vision 2030 agenda. It oversees global investment

Damascus, Nov. 30 (SANA) — Activities marking Syria’s first participation in Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) concluded in Damascus on Sunday, ending a program that ran since Tuesday under the slogan “Together We Build.” The event was organized in cooperation between the Ministry of Communications and Technology and Startup Syria, and hosted at Shooters Club in […]

Abram Brown / The Information: A profile of Klay, whose app will let users remake songs using AI; Klay has raised ~$10M and is the first AI startup to close deals with the three major labels  —  “So here's a real surprise,” said Ary Attie, holding open a hidden door in the bowels of the Walker Hotel in the city's Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Through all my pivots, one thing became clear: maintaining momentum depends on having options

The AI boom this year could lead to a wave of IPOs in the tech space in 2026, including FemTechs and AI startups in the UK.

Written by Atlas Rowe Browserbase was an instant hit, drawing early interest with its AI-driven automation tools. However,

$3M Pre-Series A Boost for CRISPR Innovator CrisprBits – A Biotech Startup Indian biotech startup CrisprBits has just raised US$3 million in a Pre-Series A funding round. This milestone move could shape the future of CRISPR-powered diagnostics, gene editing, and sustainable biotechnology. The round was led by Spectrum Impact, the family office of Rajendra Gogri […] The post Biotech Startup CrisprBits Bags $3M to Expand CRISPR Diagnostics and R&D appeared first on BioTecNika.

Chinese startup Zhonghao Xinying has challenged NVIDIA's dominance by claiming its new 'Ghana' TPU is 1.5× faster than the 2020 A100 chip and built entirely on domestic IP.

A Chinese startup founded by an ex-Google engineer has developed its own tensor processing unit (TPU) that it claims can offer performance over 1.5 times that of the Nvidia A100 GPU released in 2020, with up to 42 percent greater efficiency.

Pre-seed investment round to fund expansion of Neuchâtel laboratory.

Nicholas Fearn / Financial Times: London-based AI video startup Synthesia says its ARR reached $100M by April 2025, after reporting 2024 revenue up 82% YoY to $58M and a pre-tax loss of $59M  —  Seeing limited potential in its niche dubbing product, Synthesia built an AI tool to appeal across industries

Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal: San Francisco Compute, which provides a marketplace for AI computing capacity, raised a $40M Series A led by DCVC and Wing Venture Capital at a $300M valuation  —  Helping AI developers rent out excess computing capacity will reduce the risk of data-center overbuilding, the startup says

The Information: Sources: ServiceNow is in advanced talks to buy corporate data management and security startup Veza for $1B+ in a deal as early as next week  —  ServiceNow, an IT and HR software provider, is in advanced talks to buy five-year-old security startup Veza for more than $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the deal.

Paresh Dave / Wired: Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus, which is building AI for manufacturing computers, cars, and spacecraft, has acquired agentic AI startup General Agents  —  Project Prometheus has raised over $6 billion in funding and hired over 100 employees, a handful of whom joined through …

Project Prometheus has raised over $6 billion in funding and hired over 100 employees, a handful of whom joined through its acquisition of General Agents, according to records and sources.

Automakers are pursuing two broad strategies to protect their EV programs. One is to secure rare-earth supply outside China; the other is to eliminate or sharply reduce rare-earth use inside the vehicle by switching to alternative motor and magnet technologies.Read Entire Article

The Labour government’s Budget demonstrates renewed intent to support AI, but there is an absence of a fully integrated digital strategy. The post UK Budget 2025: Government Bets on AI and Startups appeared first on TechRepublic.

Kristin Robinson / Billboard: Documents: AI music startup Suno has spent $32M on compute power and $2,000 on data, such as music, to train its model since January 2024  —  Suno has raised $250 million in a quest to become a “verticalized” creation, social media and streaming service, according to investment documents obtained by Billboard.

Krystal Hu / Reuters: Harmonic, an AI math startup co-founded by Vlad Tenev, raised a $120M Series C led by Ribbit at a $1.45B valuation, bringing its total funding to $295M  —  - Harmonic raises third funding in 14 months from insiders  — Focus on AI's math and reasoning capabilities

Fortune: Paxos acquires Fordefi, a New York-based startup that helps customers store their digital assets, for $100M+; PitchBook: Fordefi was last valued at $83M  —  Paxos, the veteran stablecoin and blockchain infrastructure firm, is leaning further into DeFi.  On Tuesday, the company announced …

The move aims to position Paxos to serve growing institutional demand for on-chain asset issuance and stablecoin payments.

Maruti Suzuki India has made a strategic investment of nearly INR 20 million in Ravity Software Solutions Private Limited through the Maruti Suzuki Innovation Fund, acquiring an equity stake of over..

Among the large, international biotechnology companies in the exhibit hall at ASN Kidney Week was at least one startup success story.Simergent was founded in 2016 by systems engineer Steve J. Lindo and software developer and design engineer Rick Pendergraft, PhD, to pursue an idea for a gravity-based peritoneal dialysis system. In October, that system, called Archimedes, was granted FDA 510(k) clearance.Healio has reported on barriers to innovation in kidney care — including lack of government funding and policies that arguably create disincentives for innovation — that mean many startups

Jennifer Surane / Bloomberg: Revolut reaches a $75B valuation in its latest share sale led by Coatue, Greenoaks, and others, up from $45B in 2024, making it Europe's most valuable startup  —  Revolut Ltd. garnered a $75 billion valuation in its latest share sale after months of courting investors, a steep increase …

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: A US bankruptcy judge ordered Indian edtech startup Byju's founder Byju Raveendran on Nov. 20 to pay $1B+ to US lenders, over missing funds from Byju's US unit  —  Byju Raveendran, the embattled founder of Indian ed-tech giant Byju's, has blasted a U.S. bankruptcy court's order directing him to pay more than $1.07 billion.

Rest of World: A look at Indian startups like TuluAI, which are building LLMs for low-resource languages by creating data sets nearly from scratch with community involvement  —  Indian founders are building digital data sets for low-resource languages by involving the community, and count on local relevance to go against big tech platforms.

Mishal Husain / Bloomberg: Q&A with Fei-Fei Li on ImageNet, her startup World Labs' focus on spatial intelligence, superintelligence, regulation, AI bubble, US-China AI arms race, more  —  AI is now so present in our lives that the story of how it came to be so is receding — that is, if we ever absorbed it properly.

Lora Kolodny / CNBC: Figure AI's former head of product safety sues the humanoid robot startup, alleging he was unlawfully terminated after warning executives about product safety  —  Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup's former head of product safety who alleged …

A simple process for founders to make smarter, less emotional decisions with their startups.

Alex Heath / Sources: Bret Taylor says his AI agent startup Sierra has hit $100M in ARR, after launching in February 2024, up from about $20M this time last year  —  A new trend has quickly emerged for AI startups that want to stand out from the rest: brag about revenue.  —  Take Sierra, Bret Taylor …

Sierra’s Clay Bavor and Bret Taylor. | Photo: Sierra This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. A new trend has quickly emerged for AI startups that want to stand out from the rest: brag about revenue. Take Sierra, Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor's AI customer support firm that was recently valued at $10 billion. On paper, you'd think Sierra could have its pick of just about anyone who wants to work in AI - both co-founders are well-known names in Silicon Valley, Taylor is also the chairman of OpenAI, and Sierra has raised more than $600 million in less than two years. But even Sierra feels the … Read the full story at The Verge.